Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

How I went about learning Rust

eli.thegreenplace.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 303 posts

Re: How I went about learning Rust

#141

Post by [deleted] »

indiv0 wrote: post #9
xEnOnn wrote: post #3

I have been thinking to myself whether I should pick up Go or Rust as a new language this year. Coming from a NodeJS background, Rust looks a tad more complicated but it looks cooler. There are also more job listings looking for Golang than Rust which makes me wonder if Golang might be a more rewarding investment? What would be a good use case of Rust than Golang cannot do given its extra complexity and potentially l…

As someone with extensive experience with Rust and a teensy bit of experience in Go I can tell you that I adore Rust for every use case I’ve tried it out for *except* for network services. It works ok for low level proxies and stuff like that; but Python/Flask-level easy it is not. Meanwhile my experience with Go has been the reverse. I’ve found it acceptable for most use cases, but for network services it really sta…

[deleted]

Re: How I went about learning Rust

#142

Post by nicoburns »

captainmuon wrote: post #94
zozbot234 wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rust actually supports most OOP features, with the main exception of implementation inheritance. And implementation inheritance is a nasty footgun in large-scale software systems (search around for: "fragile base class problem"), in a way that just doesn't apply to simple composition and pure interfaces (traits). So it's hard to fault Rust for including the latter and not the former.

For me, one of the main reasons to use OOP is dynamic dispatch / runtime polymorphism. I have not spent much time with Rust, but it seems like that is a bit cumbersome there, and doesn't exactly work like you would expect from Java, C++, Python, .... I mostly use OOP when I have a bunch of Foos and Bars, and want to treat them differently in some places. Instead of having ifs in each function, I use inheritance, and…

It definitely works differently to C++/Java/Python, but IMO this is one place where Rust is a huge improvement. You are effectively always generic over an interface (trait in Rust) rather than a base class, and this is much more flexible as a given strict can implement as many interfaces as it likes rather than being stuck in one class hierarchy (or having to deal with the pain of multiple inheritance)

Re: How I went about learning Rust

#143

Post by Fiahil »

xEnOnn wrote: post #3

I have been thinking to myself whether I should pick up Go or Rust as a new language this year. Coming from a NodeJS background, Rust looks a tad more complicated but it looks cooler. There are also more job listings looking for Golang than Rust which makes me wonder if Golang might be a more rewarding investment? What would be a good use case of Rust than Golang cannot do given its extra complexity and potentially l…

> Coming from a NodeJS background, Rust looks a tad more complicated but it looks cooler.

Here, Rust has officially climbed past NodeJS on the "cool" ladder. Let's rejoice, and welcome our fellow programmers into our communities !

Re: How I went about learning Rust

#144

Post by nicoburns »

brobinson wrote: post #106
nailer wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Creating a new language and repeating the "billion dollar mistake" by including null (sailing under the brand name "nil" in Go) is just crazy. Can you explain? What do I set ‘score’ to when someone hasn’t sat the test yet?

Read about sum types. They exist in Haskell, Rust, OCaml, Typescript, Swift, Kotlin, etc. You are likely only familiar with product types without knowing they're called product types. (Cartesian product) You can have 100% type-safe, guaranteed at compile time code without null that can still represent the absence of data. Once you've used sum types, you feel clumsy when using Javascript, Python, Go, Ruby, C, C++, etc…

Arguably dynamic languages have sum types: every variable is one big sum type with the variants being every other type! I suspect the lack of sum types in many static languages are partially responsible for the popularity of dynamic ones.

Re: How I went about learning Rust

#145

Post by Fiahil »

Jyaif wrote: post #62
collaborative wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I founf myself in your same situation a few months ago. I chose Rust and regret it Rust is a better c++. It's not appropriate for anything you wouldn't program in c++. The coding speed is slow So if you are thinking about learning a new language to program your future apps you currently code in node, choose Go

> Rust is a better c++ The Rust language is a far better C++. In practice, the compile time and binary size of Rust are out of control, which makes Rust far from being a slam dunk over C++. Crossing my fingers this will change!

As of Rust 1.62, compilation time is no longer a valid criticism. Things have improved so much in the past 2-3 versions, it's no longer slower than C++. Sorry!

Re: How I went about learning Rust

#146

Post by pjmlp »

nicoburns wrote: post #142
captainmuon wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me, one of the main reasons to use OOP is dynamic dispatch / runtime polymorphism. I have not spent much time with Rust, but it seems like that is a bit cumbersome there, and doesn't exactly work like you would expect from Java, C++, Python, .... I mostly use OOP when I have a bunch of Foos and Bars, and want to treat them differently in some places. Instead of having ifs in each function, I use inheritance, and…

It definitely works differently to C++/Java/Python, but IMO this is one place where Rust is a huge improvement. You are effectively always generic over an interface (trait in Rust) rather than a base class, and this is much more flexible as a given strict can implement as many interfaces as it likes rather than being stuck in one class hierarchy (or having to deal with the pain of multiple inheritance)

It is no different than using interfaces, protocols, pure virtual base classes....

Re: How I went about learning Rust

#147

Post by pjmlp »

Ygg2 wrote: post #103
zozbot234 wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rust actually supports most OOP features, with the main exception of implementation inheritance. And implementation inheritance is a nasty footgun in large-scale software systems (search around for: "fragile base class problem"), in a way that just doesn't apply to simple composition and pure interfaces (traits). So it's hard to fault Rust for including the latter and not the former.

Does it? I've seen it being repeated ad nauseam without any concrete backing. I mean it has some OOP concepts. But it's mostly in traits. Saying Rust is OOP is a bit like saying Chimera is a Goat. Anyone that tried to use OOP in Rust, knows it's next to impossible.

Yes it does, OOP is a spectrum not "like Java does it".

Re: How I went about learning Rust

#148

Post by memorable »

gg2222 wrote: post #128
kouteiheika wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Anything where low-level control is required. It's not clear if there are true-Rust web apps in the wild (as opposed to web apps with some services in Rust); as far as I read, Rust web programming is ugly. There are. I run one. Written in pure Rust. 160k lines of Rust code in total, serving over 3 million HTTP requests per month. Best choice I've ever made. Rust especially shines when you need to maintain a big pro…

What Rust web libraries/frameworks do you use and recommend? How long does your Rust project take to compile?

I'm not the OP, but I liked Warp[0] the most. Actix Web is cool, but looks ugly and hard to use. Rocket doesn't even work. And Tide is lean and clean, but its examples and codes aren't as well-made as Warp.

[0]: https://github.com/seanmonstar/warp

Re: How I went about learning Rust

#149

Post by nailer »

brobinson wrote: post #106
nailer wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Creating a new language and repeating the "billion dollar mistake" by including null (sailing under the brand name "nil" in Go) is just crazy. Can you explain? What do I set ‘score’ to when someone hasn’t sat the test yet?

Read about sum types. They exist in Haskell, Rust, OCaml, Typescript, Swift, Kotlin, etc. You are likely only familiar with product types without knowing they're called product types. (Cartesian product) You can have 100% type-safe, guaranteed at compile time code without null that can still represent the absence of data. Once you've used sum types, you feel clumsy when using Javascript, Python, Go, Ruby, C, C++, etc…

https://old.lispcast.com/what-are-product-and-sum-types/

That was easy to understand.

> You can have 100% type-safe, guaranteed at compile time code without null that can still represent the absence of data.

If it's a single score, I'd still want to use null / int. There no invalid states being represented, anything else is still unnecessary complexity.

> Nullness infects your data model and always comes out of nowhere in production and ruins your day.

A TS example: trying to do anything with 'score' where score is `null | number`, would be caught be the compiler.

Re: How I went about learning Rust

#150

Post by dralley »

nicoburns wrote: post #140
dotancohen wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who even structures their Python in OOP, I'd appreciate elaboration on how you organize your Rust code. I've been glancing at Rust for far too long, never finding a weekend to dive in. Save me some headaches, how should I approach e.g. Customer - Product - Order relations without OOP? What is the canonical "Rust Way"?

Your customer, product and order are still going to be objects, but they won’t reference each other directly with references/pointers. Instead they’ll either store an id, or you’ll have a central registry of relationships using some kind of id (could be a key into a hashmap or an index into a vector) and then fetch data from the central store (or have the caller pass it in) at the last minute when running code that d…

The nice thing about doing it this way is that it makes it much easier to serialize and/or save to a database.
Post reply on HN